The -ine in Listerine has the sense, from chemistry, of “forming names of alkaloids, halogens, amines, amino acids, and other substances” (Oxford American), and we see it around quite a lot—chlorine, for example, from khlōros, green, and -ine (likewise iodine is ‘violet-colored’).

Cocaine, then, is coca-ine, relating to the alkaloid from the coca leaf. It looks like it should be (and is) pronounced co-caine, though. And co-caine in turn influenced the likes of procaine and novocaine, synthetic anesthetics that replaced the earlier use of cocaine for the purpose.

And let’s not forget caffeine, from the French, café-ine.

Mr Atkinson helpfully points out that “the Japanese, Mexicans or Indians … can do the things that are easy to do; they have low-wage labor; they can’t do the things that are harder and more complex and require more knowledge, more skills, more technology, more brainpower—that’s what we can and should be good at, and if we don’t do that then we are in real trouble.”

Any pushback from the interviewer (Liane Hansen)? Naw.

“We are not going to be second to none,” says Atkinson. If he has anything to say about it, we are in real trouble.

Civil unions and straight marriage

Arthur Goldhammer’s excellent blog on French politics and society points to this article on the French pact civil de solidarité – a kind of civil union introduced in 1999/2000, largely as an alternative to gay marriage. But the pacs has had very interesting consequences for straight couples (95% of couples with pacs are straight), as this chart shows.

The growth of the pacs’ popularity over its first decade is striking. There are now two pacs for every three marriages. Interestingly, this is because of both a significant decline in marriage, and a significant increase in the overall number of people willing to engage in some kind of state-sanctioned relationship. While you would obviously need more finely grained data to establish this properly, the obviously intuitive interpretation of this (at least to me) is that the pacs have grown both by providing an option for people who would probably not have gotten married in the first place, and attracted a number of people who otherwise would have gotten married, but who prefer the pacs’ lower level of formality (it is much easier to cancel a pacs relationship than to get divorced). …

Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.

Actually, a whole lot of terms. Who knew?

“Many other names have been used for what appears to be essentially the same process: inhibition (Herbert, 1824, in Boring, 1950), refractory phase and mental fatigue (Dodge, 1917; 1926a), lapse of meaning (Bassett and Warne, 1919), work decrement (Robinson and Bills, 1926), cortical inhibition (Pavlov, 192?), adaptation (Gibson, 1937), extinction (Hilgard and Marquis, 1940), satiation (Kohler and Wallach, 1940), reactive inhibition (Hull, 19113 [sic]), stimulus satiation (Glanzer, 1953), reminiscence (Eysenck, 1956), verbal satiation (Smith and Raygor, 1956), and verbal transformation (Warren, 1961b).” (From Leon Jakobovits James, 1962)

It’s time to reset the clocks again, now that we’re no longer saving daylight. I lost count this morning, but I can reconstruct some of it.

• Three setback thermostats. OK, these are justified; they need to know the time, and in return I save a surprising amount of energy.
• Various computers. They’re considerate enough to change time on their own, and to pass it on to an iPod and printer/fax. The printer wants to timestamp faxes. I’m not sure why the iPod wants to know what time it is; I guess it assumes that it might be my only timepiece. Ha.
• I’m happy that answering machines timestamp messages, so I can’t complain.
• Car clocks. Traditional, I guess, but…
• Cameras. I like having my photos timestamped, so I’m not complaining.
• Our kitchen radio is a recycled bedroom alarm clock. I don’t need the time from it, but if I don’t set it, it blinks at me.
• Water softener. This one uses its clock to do its regeneration cycles in the wee hours of the morning. OK.
• Cellphones do themselves.
• A small collection of wristwatches, alarm clocks and one wall clock. Dedicated to telling time, so you can’t blame them, but why do I bother to wear a watch?
• Kitchen oven and microwave. They seem to have a fantasy that I’m going to prepare some elaborate dinner ahead, put it in the cold oven, and program it to cook it later. No chance.

That’s not all of them, but I’m tired of making the list. I long ago got rid of a coffee maker with a clock in it. I will say this: electronic clocks have gotten considerably easier to set over the years. None of the clocks I set this morning presented more than a few seconds puzzlement over how to accomplish the required task.

Still. Two people. Well over 30 clocks. Crazy.

Now sure, it’s a DKos-sponsored poll, but R2K is a respectable outfit and the sample size is big enough to push the margin of error down to 2%. So even if the absolute numbers are off, the region-to-region comparison ought to be pretty close.

Voters, of course, vote for (and against) candidates, not parties. But still…

Project Icarus is just such an achievement. At MIT they took photos from an altitude of nearly 100,000 feet (not quite into space, proper) for under a $150 investment. Photos are here.

A very nice touch to the project is that by keeping the weight of their device to a minimum they did not need to get FAA permission for the flight: it was actually legal.

It’s time to embrace American royalty

We’re obviously hungry to live with royal and aristocratic families so we should really just go ahead and formally declare it:

Bush daughter Jenna Hager becomes ‘Today’ reporter NBC’s “Today” show has hired someone with White House experience as a new correspondent — former first daughter Jenna Hager, the daughter of former President George W. Bush. . . . She “just sort of popped to us as a natural presence, comfortable” on the air, [Executive Producer Jim] Bell said.  Hager will work out of NBC’s Washington bureau.

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it.  They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it’s really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. 

…

As the article mentions in passing, the causality might run in the other direction. Or in parallel.

via Ars Technica